Hacker News Reader

It also circumvents the biggest problem with fiber, politics. Starlink doesn’t need permission to run a backbone across (or rather over) a country. This will be revolutionary for people in Africa, South America, and huge swaths of Asia/Australia where a few telecom monopolies have artificially jacked the price of transit.

View on HN

IIUC, it only circumvents politics due to existing treaties. Those old treaties are likely ripe for revision with the extensive commercialization and the increasing number of countries capable of launching payloads into space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_outer_space

It definitely helps mitigate the infrastructure buildout hurdles (which are not small), but they would still need to jump through any "I need to do business in this country" regulations, etc.

Only if they want to bring a signal down to the ground. Unlike fiber, LEO sats can send data across an entire continent of countries or states without getting permission from any of them. Wanna connect Toronto to Mexico City with fiber, gotta get the US and half a dozen states and dozens of counties all to give you easement. Not so with space lasers :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com